Socialism by. Roswell D. Hitchcock Chapter 1. part 1.

This essay on socialism was written in the late 19th century. Around the same time as Marx was doing his writing. It is interesting how pertinent much of this essay is today. This is part 1 of the first chapter.

SOCIALISM IN GENERAL.

Throughout Christendom a cloud has
been gathering, and is gathering still, whose
shadow falls upon the streets of every great
city from St. Petersburg to San Francisco.
Our civilization, whose present special type
dates back now some four hundred years, in
spite of all it has achieved and all it promises,
has an under side to it of terrible menace ; as,
in ancient Athens, the Cave of the Furies was
underneath the rock, on whose top sat the
Court of the Areopagus. This under side of
our civilization is inequality of social condition,
keeping pace with the civilization ; no new
thing in history, but now commanding both
scientific and popular attention as never be-
fore : part of it sheer and simple dividend,
more or less according to the invested capital
of talent, industry, and thrift ; part of it Provi-
dential visitation by sickness, or accident, or
premature bereavement; part of it vicissitude,
inseparable from complicated interests;
part of it inexorable retribution, according to
the observance or infraction of moral laws ;
part of It, no doubt, wages unfairly restrained ;
but all of it blurred and hazy ; misunderstood
by the careless masses who have everything
at stake ; and misrepresented by the hideous
fraternity of conspirators who have nothing
at stake, and are bent on mischief. I am no
pessimist. It is not ruin that I see ahead,
but trouble, which can not be too promptly
met. The Communism of our day is a real
Cave of the Furies.

The terms Communism and Socialism are
much used interchangeably ; but they are not
synonymous. Communism is related to So-
cialism as species to genus. All Communists
are Socialists ; but not all Socialists are Com-
munists. For example, in Germany, where
Socialism, repeating in this respect the his-
tory of the old Rationalism in theology, is a
recent and rank exotic, it is decidedly, even
fiercely. Communistic ; while in France, where
it is indigenous and finer, it has come to
be decidedly and soberly Anti-communistic.
These two kinds of Socialism are not to be
confounded. Nor yet may we disregard the
relationship between them. The trunks are
two ; the root is one.

I shall therefore speak first of Socialism
in general ; or, rather, of the problem it un-
dertakes to solve.

**The poor ye have with you always," is
both historic and prophetic. Inequality of
social condition is a permanent fact in political
economy; variable only in degree. If, by
some heroic treatment, it could be got rid of
to-day, it would return to-morrow. Readjust-
ment would be necessary every few years ;
every year, might be better still. The causes
of this inequality, most of them, are likewise
permanent. Mankind are not equal in en-
dowment. In stamina of constitution, one is
strong, and another weak. Brains are larger
or smaller, coarser or finer. Natural appe-
tites and passions are more or less overbear-
ing and vehement. The will is here a master,
and there a slave. It is not merely that there
are different grades of work to be done, which
call for graded remuneration, but, in the same
grade, one will surpass another. One man
just manages to keep soul and body together,
barely making the ends of the year meet.
Another man, whose chances are no better,
comes out with a surplus. He may, or he
may not, have earned more, but, being more
provident and self-denying, he has saved more.
This surplus is capital ; and if every man had
saved, labor and capital would never clash.

All this is exclusive of sickness and acci-
dent, which, if the sickness be brief, or the
accident not disabling, the patient himself
may have provided for in advance ; but if the
sickness be protracted or hopeless, and the
accident be crippling, society may have to be
taxed for the deficit, and the inequality may
become chronic and burdensome. Exclusive
also of those distressing casualties which fre-
quently plunge whole families into sudden and
helpless poverty by striking down the hus-
bands and fathers, whose daily labor brought
them their daily bread.

There is also the liability to commercial dis-
aster; a liability that begins with commerce
itself; and commerce begins with capital ; and
capital, as we have said, is surplus. Many of
these reverses are only tidal and transient.
But some are final. To the young man,
bankruptcy may be only a fall on the ice ; in
a moment he is up again. The old man, ten
to one, goes through and under. It has been
said, that in the United States only five trad-
ers in a hundred never fail.* In older coun-
tries, the failures are fewer.

But the greatest inequality is that which
comes of immoralities ; the chiefest of which
are willful indolence, intemperance, and licen-
tiousness. In their coarser forms these three
vices give us by far the greater part of all our
paupers and outcasts. The fashionable vices,
as they are called, do not provoke immediate
expulsion from society ; but, by and by, the
moral lepers will be found outside the lepers'
gate. Audacity in stealing may threaten us
every now and then with a new plutocracy,
more vulgar and flaunting than its predeces-
sor; but, after all, there is an inner side to
the iron bars.

* Horace Wright, before the Hewitt Committee in New York,
May 23, 1878, testified that during the last four years 37,000
firms out of 680,000 had failed.

The inequality of condition thus indicated,
was unquestionably greater in the ancient
than it is in the modern world. Our Chris-
tian civilization has certainly surpassed the
Classic. But now in Christendom itself, al-
though slavery has been abolished, the ine-
quality is greater than it was four hundred
years ago, greater than it was one hundred
years ago. Socialistic writers say the ine-
quality is still increasing. But France cer-
tainly is better off than she was fifty years
ago, and England is better off than she was
twenty-five years ago. And so perhaps it
would be safe to say, that the tide has turned;
that the inequality is now diminishing. But
the times are critical. Our civilization is
sharply challenged. Passion, science, con-
science are all aroused. Under these new
lights, it is as if the inequality were but just
discovered. It maddens like a new wrong.
The Furies are not asleep in their Cave.

Our present civilization, nominally Chris-
tian, is nevertheless distinctively and intense-
ly materialistic. Its special task has been the
subjugation of nature. It can not be called
exclusively Protestant, but, along with Prot-
estantism, whose handmaid it has always
been, it was cradled amidst inventions and
discoveries which have changed the very
channels of history. Printing with movable
types, Gunpowder for the battlefield, the
Mariner's Compass, the Passage round Good
Hope, the Discovery of new Continents, were
the signs and wonders of the new epoch. By
new applications of science, by new sciences,
both land and sea are considerably more pro-
ductive than they were. These products are
wrought up into endless varieties of form,
both for use and for ornament. And com-
merce, which began on the Persian Gulf, has
now all oceans for its own.

The result is great wealth, rapidly accu-
mulated, with an inequality in the distribution
of it which can not be wholly justified ; an
inequality which only began not very long
ago to be redressed : in France, by the Revo-
lution of 1 789, and the Code Napoleon ; in
England, about twenty-five years ago; in
Germany, and most other European countries,
not yet. Here in the United States,
the inequality to be redressed has never
equalled that in Europe. As a fair represent-
ative of our present civilization, take England,
all things considered, the first nation in Eu-
rope : her industry the most diversified, her
wealth the greatest, her will the stoutest.
In the fifteenth century she was quoted
throughout Europe for the number of her
land-owners and the comfort of her people.*
In 1873 about 10,000 persons owned two-
thirds of the whole of England and Wales.
In Scotland, it is still worse, half the land be-
ing owned, it is said, by ten or twelve persons.
Over against this growing wealth and dwin-
dling number of proprietors, stands the ragged
army of paupers, of which England is ashamed.t
The continental contrasts are not so startling ;
France, indeed, is quite the other way, with
her 5,000,000 of land-owners. But taking
Europe as a whole, and comparing the prices

* Chancellor Fortescue, cited by Laveleye, "Primitive Prop
erty," p. 263.

t In 1871, 900,000; in 1878, 726,000.


of labor with the cost of living, food, clothing,
and shelter, it can be proved that the average
European peasant of the fourteenth century,
as also of the fifteenth, was better off relative-
ly than the average European peasant of the
nineteenth century.* As Froude has said,
the upper classes have more luxuries, and the
lower classes more liberty ; while in regard
to the substantial comforts of life, they are
farther apart now than they were then. And
the greater the wealth of the nation as a
whole, the greater the inequality between its
upper and its lower classes.


* In England, for example, when the wages of a common
farm hand were fourpence a day, a penny went as far as a
shilling goes now. At this rate, the common laborer should
now be getting four shillings a day, whereas in fact he is get-
ting only about two. Mechanics* wages, owing to the Trade
Unions, are a trifle higher relatively than they were then. In
Germany, the highest price paid farm hands anywhere is 56
cents a day; on the lower Rhine, the price paid is 31 cents;
in Silesia, only 18 cents.